Ethical practices in Search Engine Optimization

The aim of web hosting is to get a good traffic into your web hosting site. Search Engine Optimization helps you to improve the chances that web surfers will find your web hosting site. Since there are many competing web hosting sites, and it is natural that all of them may be employing techniques similar to the ones that you have employed, and therefore are likely to rank as highly as your web hosting site. So it’s not possible to ensue with certainty that yours will be the number one site in any search engine. In fact, you cannot even say with certainty whether you will figure in the top ten web hosting sites. So what do you do?

Why unethical practices are used and why they should be avoided

People try all kinds of tricks in their desperation to make it to the top with their web hosting site. In this process you may be using quite a number of unethical practices in promoting your web hosting site. What’s wrong with unethical practices, if they get you results? The problem is that your site may be declared an undesirable one, or worse, banned altogether, if you use unethical practices. So it’s important that you know what constitutes unethical practices in website search engine optimization.

Rules keep changing

One problem with search engines for you as a web hosting site owner trying to optimize your website for search engines is that the rules of the game keep changing, because the algorithms used by the search engines also keep getting updated. This means that your search engine optimized web hosting site of yesterday may no longer be fully optimized today. Moreover, the rules also get changed as people get cleverer in beating the system, and search engines penalize practices that were normal earlier. You have to keep all these things in mind, and that is where ethics, rather than a set of rules come in.

Examples of unethical practices

Let’s take a brief look at some of the practices used by web hosting sites that search engines frown upon as of today.

• Duplicate pages and content: You can try to get better rankings by repeating the same thing over and over again, but that’s something that search engines have become wise about. So they simply filter out duplicate content from your web hosting site and may be penalize you for them.
• Using link farms to give the false appearance of being highly linked with other sites
• Hidden text: You can put in keywords in hidden text in your web hosting site, which is the same color as the background so that they are not seen normally.
• Tiny print: Very small print that is used in excess is also frowned upon.
• Cloaking: Use of optimized pages for submission to the search engine while actually using un-optimized pages in your web hosting site.

The above is be no means an exhaustive list, but should serve to illustrate the types of approaches that constitute short-cut methods that are not approved by many search engines. Since we cannot foresee future rules that may also evolve, it is best that we stick to an ethical approach to optimization. How can we know that the methods that we are using are ethical?

As the old saying goes, “honesty is the best policy.” If you try to avoid any approach that tries to artificially improve your site rankings, without being accompanied in your mind with actual merit, you can conclude that your approach is not ethical. Whether or not any of the above is banned by search engines, you can see that none of the above approaches is genuine. The designer knows that he or she is cheating the system.

There’s a problem with being too honest also. When others use every trick in the book to get themselves placed right at the top, if you are too honest, you may be unnecessarily and unfairly losing out. So you cannot overdo the honesty part. The best approach would be to be aware of any deviations that you make, make sure they are not currently banned by any site, and keep watching for the future. You can also try and minimize all such practices, and try to promote your site as honestly as you can. Finally, don’t lose sight of the fact that SEO is only one of the factors to increase traffic to your site, and avoid going overboard in your attempt to get to the top.